Same-sex marriage backers weigh ballot date

Kern County

Nearly nine months after California voters banned same-sex marriage in the state, gay marriage supporters are ready to ask them to overturn Proposition 8. They're just not sure when to ask: In November 2010 or November 2012.

Choosing a date involves more than sifting through the polling, community meetings and consultants' reports that have filled the time since last fall's election with soul-searching and finger-pointing among supporters, culminating in a meeting of the movement's leaders Saturday in San Bernardino.

Generating enthusiasm for a grassroots campaign will also be a heart-based decision, one that has split same-sex couples even in Kern County, where 75 percent of voters backed Prop. 8.

Bakersfield resident Jade Haley wants an initiative in 2010. Her partner Alee Gamino thinks that's too soon. Gamino's Catholic mother still refers to Haley as "she" and has no contact with them as a couple, who are raising Gamino's teenage daughter from a previous relationship.

Churches' influence

On Sundays, Gamino, 34, goes to church twice. She attends a Catholic service solo with her mom in the morning and goes to a Metropolitan Community Church with her partner in the evening. "The churches have thousands and thousands of people ready to go against us," said Gamino. She looked at 70 people who came to a Unitarian Universalist Church on Thursday to talk about the movement's next step. "All we have is what's in this room."

Still, Gamino was among only a dozen people at the Bakersfield meeting called by Marriage Equality USA who supported waiting until 2012. The sentiment for a vote next year echoed one at a similar gathering in San Francisco, while gatherings in liberal bastions such as Oakland and Berkeley leaned toward 2012.

"The reaction was really mixed," said Pam Brown, Marriage Equality USA's political director, who compiled information from the organization's "Get Engaged" tour of 40 California cities over the past several weeks. "A lot of people who wanted to wait until 2012 wanted to see what the plan was first before they committed."

A nonbinding straw poll of leaders gathered Saturday in San Bernardino to plan the movement's next step found that 93 people voted to go in 2010, 49 in 2012 and 20 were undecided. Organizers expect to officially decide when to return to the ballot in a couple of weeks. If they decide on November 2010, the deadline to have ballot language submitted to the attorney general is Sept. 25.

Faults not addressed

This month, several groups of same-sex marriage supporters said not enough has been done to address the faults of last year's campaign in time to mount a winning drive next year.

Three groups representing people of color said supporters must reach out more to African Americans and Latinos. Political consultants solicited by Equality California wondered whether at least $40 million could be raised or enough supporters recruited for what would be a lighter turnout next year than 2008's presidential election.

The Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club of San Francisco, the nation's oldest LGBT Democratic club, said a 2010 measure "would require a rush that could cause our community to take shortcuts, miss important messages and fail to make critical connections. If we set the vote for 2010, we essentially need to net 1,000 voters per day, a theoretically achievable but extraordinarily ambitious goal."

Whatever decision is made, Prop. 8 defenders will be ready.

Ken Mettler, who led support for the ban in Kern County, said ties between the measure's supporters have only strengthened since last fall. People who hadn't connected much in the past - evangelical Christians and Mormons, Latinos and white conservatives - have remained connected on issues such as the anti-tax Tea Party.

David Stepp agreed that same-sex marriage is a "firewall issue" for many conservatives in the area. Over the past 16 years, the Venezuelan-born evangelical Christian pastor built his Iglesia Hispana from scratch into a congregation that fills a converted six-screen multiplex on Bakersfield's east side.

"If this would become OK, then why not marriage between three people?" said Stepp, who has a weekly radio show on a Spanish-language station.

If same-sex marriage supporters try to win hearts in California's agricultural heartland by appealing to their neighbors with personal stories, "that's the only way it could work," said Pete Baker, an evangelical pastor at a Bakersfield church whose members include Latinos, African Americans and whites. "But even then, what people say to someone's face is different than what they do at the ballot box."

Same-sex marriage backers don't expect Kern County to back same-sex marriage by 2010 or 2012 - but they want to win 2 percent more voters to their side - or 63 people a week.

Whitney Weddell, one of Kern County's anti-Prop. 8 organizers, paused when asked if that would be doable. "That," she said, "is a very good question."